A model-based approach to web-application development

The increasing growth in size and complexity of portals calls for a systematic way to portal development that allows to face the stringent demands imposed on both the development and maintenance of these systems. Model-based approaches have been proposed to mitigate this situation. These approaches aim to find models, that allow designers to declaratively specify an application. This paper presents AtariX, a model-based tool for portal development that renders HTML pages from the declarative schemata specified by the designer. Each concern is separately described in an XML document: how data is integrated and described (the content document), the topology of links (the navigation document), the layout of each element (the presentation document) and how previous aspects can dynamically vary based on the current session click stream (the adaptation document). A distinctive feature of AtariX s its architecture: client-intensive. The designer can choose whether page rendering should take place at the server or be dynamically constructed at the browser. The former can be used for data-intensive processing where data is not brought to the client.By contrast,navigation-intensive processing could be better served by bringing the data itself to the browser, and once there, generating locally the pages. This can account for an important reduction in the network traffic. AtariX has been fully implemented and its use is illustrated by designing and delivering a conference site.